Are Tanned People Perceived As More Attractive?

I just returned from a two-week vacation in the Dominican Republic. Over the past few days several people have offered positive comments about my deep tan. This compelled me to conduct a literature search to see if there were any recent studies that had explored the perceived attractiveness of individuals as a function of whether they were sporting a tan. Prior to delving into this matter, I should mention that several years ago, I coauthored a paper on the application of evolutionary psychology in understanding sun tanning behavior with Albert Peng, a practicing dermatologist whom I had originally met when I was a doctoral student at Cornell. We offered evolutionary-based explanations for some of the robust findings that kept reappearing in the literature including the fact that young single women constituted the most frequent demographic group of sun tanners. Of note, women are much more knowledgeable than men about the damages of sun exposure, and yet they engage much more frequently in the behavior. As I explain in both my 2007 and 2011 books (The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature), this puts into question the premise that consumers engage in acts that yield poor outcomes because of lack of information. Women are more informed about sun tanning and yet they succumb to its allure more so than men.

Returning to the issue at hand, are tanned people perceived as more attractive? Vinh Q. Chung et al. (2010) published a paper in Dermatologic Surgery in which they tested this exact premise. They took photos of 45 women, and posted these on the Hot or Not website (a site wherein individuals can offer 1-10 attractiveness ratings of submitted photos). Furthermore, using an Adobe Photoshop option, the authors artificially created tanned versions of the 45 photos. Accordingly, ratings were elicited for both the "untanned" (n = 6,228) and tanned (n = 8,988) versions of the photos. The authors analyzed the data in one of three ways, all of which yielded the same conclusion: tanned individuals were perceived as more attractive than their untanned versions. When matching the data within individuals, 12 of the 45 individuals saw an increase in their attractiveness (when tanned), 2 of the 45 individuals yielded a decrease in attractiveness (when tanned), and the remaining photos did not yield a statistically significant change (within-individuals). Hence, whereas at the aggregate, a tan improves an individual's perceived attractiveness, this did not hold for the majority of submitted photos. Incidentally, the researchers had originally included photos of men as well. However, these did not garner a sufficiently high number of ratings so photos of men were dropped from further consideration.

George_Hamilton

A few parting points: (1) When taking to extremes, the pursuit of a tan can yield the George Hamilton effect! Beware of too much sun exposure. (2) In some cultures where skin tone has historically been associated with social status, women are both more likely to avoid sun tanning and to purchase creams that lighten one's skin tone. As such, in some cultural settings, a tan is perceived as desirable as it is associated with a healthy glow and hence its aesthetics are appreciated. In other cultural contexts, a tan is avoided as it connotes lower social status (refer to Saad & Peng, 2006 for additional details about these issues).

As I type these words, I realize that I am fighting a losing battle to maintain my vacation tan. By next week, I'll be back to "lighter Canadian" Gad as compared to the current "Lebanese olive-skinned" Gad!

1) While it's a very inexpensive way to get attractiveness ratings, the random, unknown people surfing by a site such as that and doing the ratings makes reproducibility problematical. One wonders what exactly it is that's being rated. So that part is pretty shaky, but okay.

2) From the abstract...
RESULTS: The mean score±standard deviation was 6.3±2.3 for the untanned images and 6.5±2.3 for the tanned images (p<.001>

This is only a one tenth of a sigma difference! If tanning makes a difference in how much people like their pictures, it's really minimal.

But that's really cool somebody made a plugin which does that. I presume it can also de-tan people, so I can take George Hamilton and make him look "right"? (It's always been one of those things on my To Do list.) There must be a Goldilocks zone, so one wonders if the experimenters perhaps didn't add too much or not enough tan to make a maximal difference. Dialing up or down the amount of tan until it was "right" would seem to be a highly subjective process in itself.

I suppose your study was conducted on white Americans. I would think that the results of the study would be quite different in the Asian context where fair is considered beautiful, where there is an increasing demand for whitening products.

How is this different than Satoshi's article? Don't get me wrong I am not offended by either yours or his articles. I'm just wondering how he writes an excellent article but causes a shitload of controversy but your article is fine.

In what country and culture? In Africa? In Asia? When you write an article or cite a study executed on a US-centric website, I would think the sample bias would be obvious. In Asia, pale white skin is considered much more beautiful than tanned skin. And let's not start with Africa. The world doesn;t start and end on the US east and West Coasts, you know.

"(2) In some cultures where skin tone has historically been associated with social status, women are both more likely to avoid sun tanning and to purchase creams that lighten one's skin tone. As such, in some cultural settings, a tan is perceived as desirable as it is associated with a healthy glow and hence its aesthetics are appreciated. In other cultural contexts, a tan is avoided as it connotes lower social status (refer to Saad & Peng, 2006 for additional details about these issues)."

Does the latter sentence suggest that I am unaware of this issue?

Also, as I explain in the post, the researchers utilized the Hot or Not site to collect their data. Hence, I am unsure that it is possible to know the country of origin of the participants (although I suppose that one could know the racial and ethnic profile of the targets who were evaluated on the site).

Hence, prior to leaving patronizing (and ignorant) comments, you might next time take a bit more time reading a blogger's post.

"prior to leaving patronizing (and ignorant) comments, you might next time take a bit more time reading a blogger's post."

I see someone is very touchy and defensive. Yes, your entire post suggests ignorance. If you need to quote a textbook to know that tanning is not considered attractive in all cultures, you should travel more. You call me ignorant, however I have lived on three continents, and would never write such an ignorant post as a result.

A professor who doesn't know about sampling bias? No wonder you teach at a third-tier university. Go to hotornot's stats on Alexia and you'll see that 41% of its visitors are from the US, and 12% from the UK- a similar anglo-saxon, non-tropical culture. If you add visitors from Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and Germany, 67% of the site's traffic are from predominantly white countries where the sun is scarce for much of the year, and tanning is considered attractive.

So basically, the study you cite is rubbish. Your post should have said: 'People in white countries where the sun is scarce think tans are more attractive.' And then having stated the obvious, collected your Nobel Prize for this blinding new insight.

Clearly, you are an engaged reader, as evidenced by the numerous comments that you've posted on various PT posts (most of which are belligerent in spirit). Instead of being so hostile and insulting, why not simply engage the bloggers in a polite debate? Hurling such insults only serves to weaken your position. I suspect that the anonymity afforded by the Internet grants you the freedom to be uncivil.

In putting up my post, my objective was not to engage in facile undergraduate methodological critiques (e.g., that the sample might not be representative of a broader population). My undergraduate students at my "third-tier university" (BTW, ranked in the top 100 business schools in the world) as well as my graduate students at Cornell, Dartmouth, and UC-Irvine where I've been a professor, are well aware of sampling bias (usually by my first lecture).

If you are going to be this caustic, have the moral courage to identify yourself. Give your name and provide a photo of yourself. Let people know who you are. Hence, if you raise great points, your reputation will benefit from your superior "intelligence." On the other hand, if you appear capriciously nasty, hostile, and angry, the world can have a better sense of your true nature.

Don't be a coward and hide behind the veil of anonymity. Identify yourself (which by the way you also don't do on your blog).

Here is a prediction: To the extent that you'll reply, it will be filled with newly-generated venom and rancor. The spots on a leopard cannot be erased even when these are invisible to the world under the cowardly protection of anonymity.

Make sure to offer enough personal information about yourself so that anyone can exactly know who you are. Don't simply write "John Smith" from Nevada.

I do hope that you'll alter your ways and choose to be civil. There is no need to be brutish. Ultimately, most bloggers participate in this forum because they are excited about sharing ideas (as we otherwise make very little money). Most of us welcome comments from readers albeit few enjoy interacting with a small sample of anonymous readers endowed with a delusional sense of self-importance.

Not sure if posting an comment on an old article is appropriate let me know!

Have you looked into the effects of beta carotene causing a orange/yellow skin tone that is quite different from the browning effect of sun tanning? I read a study on beta-carotene and skin attractiveness where subjects took bc supplements for 8-10 weeks and found their new tones were more attractive to test subjects. Apologies for not linking the study as I read it quite a while ago.

When searching for WHY white people , especially women want to get brown in the first place, I came across your post. It seems strange in a dominate society (USA) that generally holds in low esteem people of color, why on earth do whites want to look like them?